Apple Ipad Secrets

I had to laugh at Tina Fey’s remark during her acceptance speech at the recent Mark Twain Prize for American Humor ceremony that while people will use Twitter or Facebook to opine on the event, she expects that by the time her daughter reaches instant-messaging age she’ll be communicating with her friends through brain and fingertip sensors. it got me thinking, as if I needed any extra prompting, about the ferocious rate of innovative change in products and services over the last couple of decades ; change that has literally transformed the way we perform certain tasks or experience life. being a brand professional, I also thought about how critical it is for companies to understand that there’s no advantage to being a first-mover brand unless you’re also the first-to-do-it right brand. as companies bob and weave, as they research and develop to get things into the marketplace faster than the next guy, they’ve got to keep in mind that brand strength doesn’t come from being first. it comes from being the first to promise and deliver a product or service that is genuinely different in a way that people care about. being first is only a brand benefit if your brand is seen as the original game changer; as the brand that defines and owns a category.

By way of example, I thought back to my experience with the Sony Walkman (yes, I am that old). here was a product that changed the paradigm of how we listened to music. all of a sudden we could take our music with us and listen to it without anyone else listening in. back then it seemed almost like magic. The Walkman was the personal musical device of its time. Because Sony did it so well, people didn’t want any other kind of mobile music player. They wanted the badge associated with wearing the Walkman brand name. And Sony, for as long as the era lasted, continued to find new and meaningful ways to support its leadership position and its stake as the “real thing.” The same can be said, more recently, of brands including Amazon, Toyota’s Prius, Netflix, and eBay. each brand captured consumer interest by being not just a new kind of experience, but the exemplar of that experience. And each continues to find inventive ways to keep our interest and our belief in their pre-eminence as category change-agents, and leaders.

Which, speaking of exemplars, brings me to the latest and greatest first-to-do-it-right brand, the iPad. Not a laptop, not a television, not anything we’ve ever seen before, the iPad is, indeed, a category segment unto itself. as Seinfeld’s friend, George Costanza, might say, the iPad is “worlds colliding,” or in contemporary parlance, convergence. The worlds of the books we want to read, the movies and TV shows we want to watch, the games we want to play, the recipes we want to cook, the newspapers we want to read and, now, “oh-bla-di,” the Beatles song we want to hear, all available on a device whose interface is as intimate and cool and friendly as everything else from Apple. it allows users to seamlessly experience more and different types of content than anything else out there. in essence, it’s the perfect personal media companion.

Any brand can be a first mover. Not good enough, especially in an environment where things change in the blink of an iPad, Pod, Phone. The not so secret to gaining brand advantage is to be the first-to-do-it right and to keep it right by way of innovation and continuous assessment of what consumers find meaningfully different. The iPad and other current category changers will be tough acts to follow, let alone catch. Sure, some companies will be able to deliver on the basics less expensively. They may even come up with a feature here or a color there that will turn some heads. But, until the next category-changer comes along (brain and fingertip sensors, anyone?),the iPad and its ilk will be the original brands to beat.

For iPad and other originals, it’s not first-mover advantage, but first-to-do-it-right advantage